“So what the hell do we do with
him?” I asked.
Bosco and I were driving back from
lunch in his car. We had purposely
avoided talking about Pierre throughout the meal. I know I didn’t have much to add on the
subject and Bosco rebuffed the only attempt I made at bringing it up. But now he seemed ready to engage and I was
fascinated by his response.
“It’s obvious, Michael.”
“It is?”
“Sure. The answer was right in front of us all
through that little meeting we just had with him.”
“Kindly educate me.”
“Well, do you notice how Pierre
always shows up at a meeting with a notepad?”
I’m a fairly observant fellow and
so that small detail had not escaped me.
I nodded and Bosco continued.
“He takes his job very
seriously. In fact, I bet he puts what
he believes is a lot more effort in every day than either you or I do. He doesn’t respond to the extra money I offer
him because that doesn’t motivate him.
He also doesn’t seem to really care if you and I shit all over him. He just shuts down and looks at how unfair
everything is. He feels like a cog. His problem is that he doesn’t get the one
thing he craves the most. He wants to be
in on the decision making process.”
“That’s true, but that’s not the
point. Pierre needs to feel that he
matters. I think that if we let him in
on our planning sessions, we might be able to get him to do what we want. If he becomes part of the process that establishes
goals and strategies, he’ll feel like he’s part of the inner group. That sense of belonging is very important to
Pierre. Even if he needs to start at the
bottom, he doesn’t want to feel as though that’s what he’s doing.”
“I have a friend who married his
girlfriend right out of college,” I said while staring out the window at a very
attractive woman seated on a motorcycle.
We were on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, so she was
riding without a helmet. Her long blonde
hair was braided tightly and I tried to imagine what she might look like with
it hanging loose about her shoulders. As
I did this, she turned to me and smiled.
I was a bit embarrassed, but I managed to wave to her just before she
gunned her bike and sped off ahead of us.
“And?” Bosco asked, bringing me
back to our conversation.
“Well, she got a degree in English,
or History, or something like that.”
“Liberal Arts!” Bosco
chuckled. “Yeah, not a lot of jobs out
there for folks with that particular piece of paper. At least not right off.”
“Absolutely. She was really bummed out too. She went out and applied for every day job
she saw in the paper. You couldn’t say
she didn’t have that part of the game down.”
“But,” Bosco interrupted, “She
didn’t have game though, did she?”
“Am I telling you this story or are
you gonna?”
“Play on!”
“Thank you. Anyway, she didn’t get any offers and she was
depressed as hell about it. I went over
to their place for a couple beers after work a few weeks back and she was there,
all upset. Her husband was trying to
cheer her up, but all she did was cry, ‘Four years of college and this is what
it gets me’.”
“Think Pierre feels that way?”
“I sure as hell do, Bosco. So, I’m going to have to agree with you for
once. If we’re going to ever get Pierre
to perform, we’re going to have to bring him in. This might not be too bad a thing anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“Maybe he can tell me why kids his
age want to buy hair.”
“You don’t know?”
“Shit, Bosco! I don’t understand why anyone buys
hair!”
“No you don’t, do you?”
“Nope.”
“It’s my humble suggestion that you
keep that one great truth to yourself, Michael.
I get what you’re saying. But the
studio owners who pay us for advice wouldn’t be all that understanding.”
“I’m not stupid, Bosco.”
“No, you’re not. But you can sometimes be too blunt and that
makes it seem like you’re arrogant.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Okay!” Bosco said, ready to change
the subject. “So when we get back to the
office, I want to look at our new site with you. The beta is live now and we can go over how
this thing is going to work.”
“We bringing Pierre in on this?”
“Might as well. I built it for him and all of his Gen-X
friends!”
A half hour later, Pierre, Bosco
and I crowded around the screen in Bosco’s office. To an outsider, it might have resembled a
trio of cold, hungry cavemen at the primeval moment of the discovery of fire,
with the exception that the youngest of those cavemen was taking copious notes
of everything that he saw or heard.
Bosco clicked from page to page on the new site, which had the
unfortunate URL: “theresnohaironmyhead.com”.
“You really like that?” I had asked
Bosco of the site’s address.
“Actually, Michael – I’d rather
hear what Pierre thinks about it.”
Pierre stopped scribbling in his
notebook and took a long look at the site page on the display. He flipped back a couple of pages in his
notebook, looked at the words there and then with a serious expression, he gave
us his verdict.
“It’s perfect.”
“Why?” I asked.
Pierre looked down at his notebook
again, but didn’t appear to be reading from it.
Instead, he spoke slowly and clearly, apparently trying to explain to me
a concept that he found so simple that I must have appeared to have been brain
damaged to him.
“Because it’s the first thing that
will go through a guy’s head when he suddenly realizes that he’s going bald.”
When I went home that afternoon, I
reflected on what Pierre had said. This
hadn’t been what had popped into my tiny little mind when I first realized that
I was losing my hair. It had been one
morning shortly after my 31st birthday.
I’d wandered into the bathroom to take a leak and brush my teeth. Afterwards, I looked into the mirror to take
stock of the damage I’d inflicted on myself during the previous evening
out. The tell tale signs of a fair
amount of alcohol and marijuana abuse presented themselves as I looked at my
bloodshot eyes and the black marks underneath them. Screw it, I thought. I can work this off with a couple cups of
fresh ground coffee and a brisk walk outside.
I was almost ready to turn away and leave the bathroom when I glanced at
the mess of hair on the top of my head.
When I was a boy, my mother taught
me how to part my hair and comb it. In
spite of the fact that my hair always seemed to stick out from the back, sheer
will power and repeated brushing “trained” it to bend to my will. I was able to rake my fingers through my hair
and have it settle out the way my mother liked it by the time I was maybe 9
years old and from that day, I swore I’d find a way to destroy the one image of
myself that she had coerced me into creating.
When I was 16, I grew out my hair shoulder length and parted it right
down the middle. To my delight, this had
the effect of infuriating both of my parents. Nothing more rewarding than getting a little
two-for-one action! But as I looked into
the mirror 15 years later, I saw that the fine part that I had nurtured with
such malice aforethought had seemingly…widened!
In fact, it looked less like a neat line that separated the right and
left poles of my head as it did the runway of a major metropolitan airport.
As my right forefinger traced the
path of this augmentation, I began to wonder how long it had been going
on. Things like the loss of what appear
to be perhaps a quarter of the hair on one’s head don’t normally happen
overnight. Obviously, this had been
developing for quite some time, but I’d either been too oblivious to notice, or
perhaps I had seen it and subconsciously chosen to ignore the whole thing.
I hadn’t given it another thought
since.
Deep
down, I guess that I really didn’t get the hair replacement business.
The next episode of SlipNot will be published on July 29th.
If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO
HERE.
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